TSMC cleared to construct 3nm chip factory in Southern Taiwan

There's only so much they can do with silicon though, right? We're almost at the end of the road.

I think 2.5 nm is sort of the minimum. But we are long way from using something other than silicon. It is not the size that matters, it is how you use it. (That is definitely not what she said :D ) The most important of all is density, and then the architecture itself. Current multiple patterning lithography has reached it's limit. EUV lithography is what will be the main process for a long time. And for the far future, brains at MIT and University of Colorado are working on ALE (Atomic Level Etching) technique. That is some crazy science fiction stuff. Amazeballs! Also more, and more manufacturers are turning to software optimizations, rather than raw horsepower. There is so much performance to be gained there.

Silicon is here to stay. I don't see it leaving for decades.
 
Silicon is here to stay. I don't see it leaving for decades.
It's going to be a while, maybe another decade, but it's unlikely it will be much more than that, the closer we get to the limits, the more money gets thrown at finding alternatives, technological progress & improvements to efficiency on a grand scale are fundamental to the progress of humanity & are almost always worth far more money than is put into them(Even when that input money reaches the 10's to hundreds of billions), so whether we put more money into optimising designs in silicon or finding alternatives basically depends on which one has the best cost:benefit ratio, if rewriting decades worth of software from the ground up starts to become a requirement of utilising progressive technologies then the cost of the software development will become dominant and eventually that dynamic is going to flip.
There's a fair few materials that have had a few decades of research, which are mostly limited by the fact we don't have ways to cheaply/reliably mass produce them as circuits, but as MCM's are set to become ubiquitous in all high end processor industries by 2020 we're no longer going to have to use just the material that is the most versatile, we could see these currently exotic materials used in very small scales initially for specific areas they're suited to.

Optronics is another part of the puzzle, ditching electrical signalling altogether would solve bucket loads of problems if we had more efficient & cheaper semiconductor light emitter/readers, but this is again dependant on semiconductor materials progress.

But yeah, there's still plenty of optimisations to find in existing silicon transistors, as well as stacking techniques too, while MCMs would allow total die size to continue growing in line with Moores law till long after silicon scaling ends. I think the first uses we will see for carbon sheets(Graphene/carbon nanotubes) will be in stacked silicon dies primarily to improve heat dissipation, possibly with some functionality as I/O elements(We can already do basic circuits with nanotubes), while their use in wireless modems as their active-component-debut (Possibly 6G if not 5G networks) is almost guaranteed.
 
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